Aincradian
by PhLi
Summary: An alternative SAO where it bears more resemblance to GGO, and does so without any compromise in its lethality.


**The Summary**

A huge castle carved out of marble and filled with steel beams floating in an endless white space.

That was all the world was, for those who inhabited the castle.

It took an unprecedentedly massive team of designers and programmers a month just to survey their creation. The diameter of each floor was on average 10 kilometres, give or take - enough to fit an entire city within. One hundred such floors stacked one on top of another, its sheer size unbelievable, all constructed by terabytes of zeros and ones.

Inside, there were a couple of large cities along with countless smaller towns and villages, forests and grasslands, mountains and lakes. Only one gate linked each floor to another, and the gate would only open on the condition that all hostile forces within the floor must be eliminated. So discovering and navigating to one was never an easily-accomplished feat. Though once someone managed to bring the battle for the dominance of a floor to an end, the gate to the next level would unlock and make it possible for anyone to move freely between the levels.

An inferno of battles that had engulfed the lives of approximately twelve thousand people, the name of the game was Aincrad and so was the name of the castle.

* * *

**The First Story**

Dried branches cracked as hiking shoes stepped over them, snapping the fibres in half. The pine forest hummed gently as the night wind sneaked its way through the needles. The season on the 41st floor of Aincrad was late-autumn. It was a bit chilly, but at the same time it calmed me, making me more chemically aware of the surroundings. A rain was building up in the clouds as moonlight retreated behind cover, darkness filled the forest and devoured each and everything in it, including us.

We steadily approached the next waypoint on the map, taking extra precautions to not disturb the surroundings. There was no beachhead on this floor yet, as we were the first players to cross the not-yet opened gate. One of the quests that we carried over from the last level suggested that some hostile NPCs in a village near the edge of the 41st floor may carry maps containing information regarding the precise boundaries of the large swathes of minefields on the previous floor that had delayed the main force for days.

Despite the general lack of ambient light, the 4 photo intensifier tubes on my helmet gave me almost a completely unhindered, albeit monochromatic vision. Three other players walked in front of me, jerking their heads from side to side as they scanned different directions. I grasped the fore-end of my rifle tightly, while the stock periodically tapped me on the edge of the shoulder as I walked forward. Cold sweat seeped from the pores on the skin of my fingers and was subsequently absorbed by gloves' felt lining. I liked this rifle a lot, so much so that I asked the talented blacksmith who crafted it for a name. "Dark Repulsor", she giggled as she named it. The gun, chambered in 300 Blackout, was something that I would call it a tack driver. I've shot groups of less than half an inch at a hundred meters, using her handcrafted cartridges. Though its measly 9 inches of barrel length was not meant to be a precision tool to begin with. When loaded with the cheap subsonic loads that one can find in any generic store, with a suppressor attached it was barely louder than a nail gun. While still quite loud on an absolute scale, the important part was that it retained pretty impressive ballistic performance at close range and lacked the typical ear-piercing crack of a supersonic projectile.

Since the last time I checked the map some fifty minutes ago, we've probably covered some three kilometres, given the slow pace that we keenly maintained. The destination should be minutes away from our current location.

"We'll make a right turn when you see the ditch, that will be the beginning of the clearing that we're heading to." Asuna's whisper came through the earphones, breaking the silence in the process. "Remember the party cap for the quest was five" she added, "hard quests don't spawn until the last floor is cleared, and if nothing goes wrong we'd be back to Jaileum in two hours."

"Yeah yeah whatever you say, it's not like the first time that you've gotten us into trouble." I made my best attempt to lighten up the mood.

"Hey Naut, could you pass me a new battery? My laser's dead." Another voice started speaking as soon as I finished my sentence.

"Didn't you just get one yesterday?"

"Yeah well, the pressure pad probably bumped into something in the bag, I don't know."

After some shuffling noises, a dim beam of light flashed, briefly illuminating the trees, and the ditch in front of us. Though hypothetically a discharge of an infrared illuminator when unintended could attract unwanted attention, but the overwhelming majority of the NPCs lacked proper night vision equipment and were completely oblivious to anything outside the visible spectrum. The actual enforcement of the rule had gradually become very lax as the players grew less and less paranoid about the mechanics of the death game itself.

This was supposed to be an irrigation ditch on a farmland, according to the description given by the NPC from the previous level. Across the farm, there would be a row of houses wherein one of them served as an outpost for a small squad of hostile NPCs. By killing them and searching the house for evidence, the quest would be accomplished and naturally, we would obtain the minefield's complete information as a reward, then possibly sell it off for a fortune. The ditch was fairly deep for its purpose and thanks to the unharvested wheat crops surrounding us, we could almost stand completely upright and move across the field while staying completely hidden. As we walked the wind became stronger, carrying wet droplets of rain. It was the perfect opportunity, as poor weather further reduced the visibility and masked our approach.

The ditch ended several hundred meters later, and was intersected by another ditch running perpendicular to it. Behind it stood a lone house surrounded by tall walls topped with barbed wires.

"Is it the right one?" Asuna inquired through her radio.

I quickly opened the menu by swiping down with my non-dominant hand - since this feature was not a physical entity in the game, it was only visible to the player themselves who summoned it. In the quest description, there was a picture of the target house, and all the features looked more or less the same compared to the one standing before us. On top of that, the windows on the attic were mostly blocked out by bricks, leaving only slits in the middle, a typical feature found on most outposts in the game.

"I think so."

"We're going to sneak along the bottom of the wall to the front and check what kind of door they have."

We moved quickly under the concealment of the night. Around the first corner, there was a fuse box.

"Kirito, give me the pliers." Asuna commanded me as she worked on the core of the lock on the fuse box with a set of picks.

"They might still have some of the lights on."

"It's just the storm. Now hand me the pliers."

Quietly I obliged her wishes, reaching into my backpack for the tool.

With the fuse box now in ruins, not much was going on on the other side of the wall, at least none that I could hear. After rounding the next corner, we now stood right in front of the door. It didn't seem very sturdy, most likely just a single sheet of metal. The unfortunate part was that whatever lock the door had was applied on the inside, rendering lock picking impossible. Around the same time, the noise of dogs barking came from behind the door.

Without saying a word, Asuna took out the sawed-off shotgun from behind her back and pointed it forty-five degrees toward the door's bolt. Instinctively I stepped slightly behind her, rifle raised and stock tightly against the edge of the chest plate - pointed directly at the edge of the door.

"Naut you cover the left, whenever you're ready."

My vision turned white as the slug, along with a cloud of unburnt propellant blasted its way through the flimsy sheet metal, cutting through whatever was in its path. With a firm kick on the gate, it quickly swung back, leaving a gap of about half a meter. The illuminator, set on medium power, shined across the right side of the yard and revealed nothing but the empty features on the wall. My brain decided to take the gamble as my body charged toward the inside of the wall on the right. As I once again turned toward the house, I saw an alleyway that directly connected to the backyard. A man dressed in camouflage, bathed in infrared light, raised his firearm in my direction. I placed the bottom of the ring on the holographic sight's reticle along the centreline of his body and pulled the trigger twice. Four suppressed gunshots rang out and my opponent was knocked off balance by the impact, and at the same time his muzzle flashed, a string of loud bangs came out but none of the bullets struck me. My rifle settled after the recoil and this time I placed the bottom edge of the ring right on his forehead, followed by a light squeeze of the trigger.

As I scanned to the left, it looked like my teammates had fortunately encountered no resistance as they came through the gate and had begun their advancement toward the front door.

Without leaving any time for the NPCs to react, the wooden front door was blasted open by a hand grenade and another one followed into the hole.

The four of us approached the entrance upon hearing the explosion, this time in reverse order. Two corpses lay face down on the floor, with bits of tissues and blood scattered across the walls and ceiling. The rest of the first floor was clean, with no one occupying it as we came in.

Sanza led the way up the stairs since the staircase turned clockwise and he was left-handed. I stayed directly behind him and prepared to rotate toward the left as soon as he moved out of the way. Once the flashbang detonated across the room, the charge went as planned with me leading the left flank. I caught the glimpse of a person running across the room and sent a few rounds toward the silhouette, he disappeared into a corner that could not be seen from the outside followed by the sound of a heavy object impacting the wall. I pressed forward, going around to the other side of the door and found a dead body curled up in the corner. Asuna followed behind me as I slowly made my way into the room, covering each other's back. There was nothing else alive.

A sharp shriek came from the opposite end of the house, followed by the sound of a few suppressed gunshots and a loud blast.

Then I heard Nautilus talking over the radio.

"I think that's it."

"Have you checked the attic?"

"Yeah the last one was hiding in there, he jumped down after I threw a flashbang into the attic. So I just shot him in the face."

"Did you search the body?"

"Not yet."

"Well I'll take a look at this one over here, meet you outside."

The corpse's clothes were soaked in blood and made everything sticky and at the same time slippery. He didn't have anything on him, really, it looked like this NPC just woke up from sleep as we came in, before being immediately condemned into another slumber. From the pants pocket, I managed to retrieve a phone, also covered in blood. Though fortunately, fingerprint on the dead body's right thumb was all it took to unlock the device. The phone's album was mostly pictures of different guns and selfies, but after some digging, I found a picture of a map with different markers drawn on top of it. I made sure that the phone's Bluetooth was on and saved the picture on mine as a duplicate, in case if the quest NPC wouldn't share with us the picture upon the completion of the mission, which had happened several times in the past.

The way back was met with the same boring silence, only colder and the rain had become much heavier. The backpack felt a lot heavier on my shoulders, partly due to the sheer amount of loot I managed to find in the house, including the gold-plated 1911 hidden in a drawer inside the attic, though I had plans to present it to Asuna as a gift once we returned; the other half of the exhaustion could be attributed to the sudden relief of stress after spending hours on the edge of a floor previously untouched by any human activity.

Though after more than a year surviving in a hell of a game, I had come to the realisation that nothing in this world couldn't be fixed by a hot bath in the tub and a good night's sleep

* * *

**The Second Story**

"Well I've got to say, it was some amazing memory for something that happened more than a year ago." He commented, upon listening to my story attentively for the past five minutes.

"So I take it that you don't believe any of it?" I inquired as the man across the table gave me an excuse of an answer.

"No, no - I totally believe you. Otherwise why would I show up after work at 9 o'clock in the evening?" Eiji, or going by his old name, Nautilus, paused. "How's life been since the… you know."

"Good, all good."

I looked around the cafe as my mind raced, searching for an answer that would sound sincere, while not giving too much detail. After all, the familiar face sitting in front of me, across the small round wooden table, has never actually met me in real life. I had barely talked to this person for at most the past ten minutes, and yet the way our words mingled, it felt as if we'd been friends since high school. Instinctively my memories trusted him but at the same time the logical part of my brain kept me from doing so completely. It took quite a substantial amount of effort just to convince myself to not tell a total stranger about what I've been doing to Asuna several times a day for the past two months.

Having decided on the topic, I pressed on with the conversation.

"Now that I'm out of rehab, I'll just be focusing on getting my study back on track after the two-year absence, the next term is starting in a week anyways. To be honest, I'm actually quite surprised by the fact that they'd just let me continue, instead of kicking me out of the program or something like that. And… you?"

"Just helping out at my ex-" he paused, before exhaling rapidly, "girlfriend's father's lab. He does research related to neuroscience."

Right, his girlfriend, the reason why I hadn't seen him since the 41st floor and the primary cause of his resignation from the Knights of the Blood. The man was a huge fan of his girlfriend, so much so to the point that he'd spend half the cut Asuna gave him to buy her stuff. She was a singer, from what I've gathered over the years, an amateur one and not exactly the type who'd enjoy playing a simulation-style shooting game. An excellent plot for a tragic love story.

"I'm sorry that she didn't make it." I wished that the half-assed apology that had possibly been said to him hundreds of times by different people would make him feel a little better.

"Look, I get what you mean. Sometimes you just can't move on from the past. It's actually impossible. The past just becomes a part of you. And I'm dealing with it just fine." He shrugged, not showing the tiniest hint of sorrow. "So what is it? You can't sleep?"

"No. It's the story that I told you just now. It's a… dream that I've been having for quite a while now. Not everyday, but every once in a few days. There was nothing special about it and it was like watching a replay. Everything went the exact same way every time I saw it. There was you; there was Asuna, Sanza and there was me.

"We did the quest, without taking a single hit. Then I'd search the body in the bedroom, while you probably did the same to the one that jumped down from the attic and got shot in the face. Then I'd unlock the phone with his bloody finger and upload the minefield's map onto my phone."

Suddenly he interrupted me.

"So just like every other mission that we've ever done, you've done shit like this hundreds of times. How do you even know that the phone was unlocked by the thumb? From what I know you could be just making this up because you think, and because you've convinced yourself that you, after spending two years trapped in a death game, must have developed some sort of mental disorder. Back then there was the Gulf Syndrome, you know, and now people in the news industry are talking about an Aincrad Syndrome. Are you sure it's not just in your head?"

"See, this is what I've been talking about. Last time when I asked Asuna she said, pointing a finger to my head, that it was impossible because the same night we were out in Jaileum Plaza having an early Thanksgiving dinner because Heathcliff said you were getting depressed and should be taking a break. Now that I've talked to you, and your version was about the same as mine, but when I got to the part about finding that gold-plated 1911 from a drawer in the attic, and literally waving it in front of your face, telling you that 'I've found a jackpot', you just somehow don't remember a thing.

"So you tell me, how am I supposed to know if I was getting delusional, or you had a tumor in your brain, or Asuna's memories went nuts, or for some reasons we just all went insane. And I haven't even told you everything. The dream is coming from somewhere. It has to have some significance to it. From the attic I found the golden gun, and you know, back on the 40th floor, that stuff was rare at the time. So if I ever gave it to her she would have at least remembered some bits of it, right?

"But since both of you recalled that nothing of any importance happening that night, it means that my memory was the one with the most holes in it. And now the question is: what does it represent?"

I was staring outside the window, as I noticed, when my rant came to an end. The window was kind of foggy and with all sorts of condensation built up on it, as orange street lights casted soft shadows from above the trees. The details in the lighting couldn't possibly be simulated, at least with today's technology. At that exact moment I felt grounded, connected to the objective reality as I knew it. But at the same time it was distant, as I missed the feeling of the two ceramic plates squeezing my rib cage, and the sling of my rifle chafing my neck.

"You're probably just overthinking it." He murmured, staring blankly into a spot on the ceiling.

"Fine. Now let me ask you this: have you been buying guns lately?" I simply let the question loose without thinking too much about it.

"What? How'd you know that?"

"I don't know, maybe because I've been doing the same shit as well. Loads of it, actually. Blowing all my college money on some overpriced fancy laser pointer that I've got absolutely no use for it.

"Sometimes it feels like that I've never been rescued, you know. The game didn't end on floor 75. It just never ended for me. Sometimes I walked around the streets and just wondered 'why do these NPC look so real'? I went into a supermarket and then tried to swipe down my finger when they asked me 'debit or credit'. I've got a jacket on me right now and somehow I still feel naked, without being strapped between two plates."

"So do you have one on you right now?" He chuckled.

"How did you know?"

Eiji shrugged, without saying a word.

"Glock 19, appendix, two spare magazines, fifty rounds in total." I answered as I patted my stomach, "I just can't walk outside without one anymore. Otherwise I feel naked. Have you heard of the killings recently?"

"No, has there been any?"

"I don't know. Just… be careful out there."

With a swift movement of the neck, he gulped the rest of the cold coffee down his throat.

"It's getting late, I might as well get going now, still got work to do tomorrow."

As he pushed on the door, I called out to him again.

"About a month ago I was interviewed by a reporter, and he asked me, 'how would you comment on your miraculous survival through the game of death'. You know what I said?"

Smiling, he shook his head. I took it as the cue for me to deliver the punchline.

"Who said I did?"

I sank back into the cushion of my chair as I once again pondered if I could have given him a better answer.


End file.
